The new 'new middle class' — not!
By Jonathan Singer
Federal ALP backbencher Mark Latham announced in a February 23 Australian Financial Review article that "wired workers" are "a constituency social democrats have long dreamt about. Now the movement of economic history has brought them within reach."
Latham is an advocate of the "Third Way" — the degraded social democracy practised by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President Bill Clinton.
Latham's belief that he has discovered the Third Way's historical social base makes him giddy: "This is proof of the way in which the Hegelian dialectic still propels history. Wired workers represent a synthesis of the historic tension between labour and capital ... Already 30% of our work force are wired workers [and] the continued pace of the information revolution will make them the dominant force in our public life.
"Already in Sydney ... wired workers have become the key target group for election campaigning. This is why the NSW Right faction holds the key to Labor's policy revival."
Latham says wired workers are "information-rich, self-reliant citizens" who "work in small self-directed teams, using and creating advanced information technology, [in jobs based on] problem solving rather than repetitive tasks. Often they have been liberated from the hierarchal structure of large corporations [and are] free agents of the new economy: well-educated consultants and contractors specialising in knowledge work."
Wired workers, according to Latham, are the product of an "economic revolution" — "Just as feudalism produced farm labour and the Industrial Revolution factory work, the information age is creating wired workers" who have set "a new politics in motion".
"They want market decisions to determine economic outcomes", Latham continues. "Yet wired workers also have a strong interest in social solidarity. They are exceptionally tolerant of social diversity, as long as this is expressed with a sense of social responsibility."
The likely catalyst for Latham's thinking is "Knowledge Workers Revealed", a report by the Economist magazine and corporate advisers Anderson Consulting.
Having caught this wave, however, Latham is threatened with being dumped because the report's main concern is with management control over these workers (knowledge workers are not managers, but, according to the report, are averse to "involvement in decision-making beyond their immediate sphere of work").
A question Latham's article answers in a contradictory fashion is, who are knowledge workers? In today's work force, it is probably true that at least 30% — or even 50% in the US, as Latham claims — use "advanced" (computerised) technology. But most — clerical and secretarial workers, customer service workers and technicians — do not use computerised technology in a way that leads to new forms of knowledge, or have a work environment such as Latham describes.
Telephone call centres — a fast growing area of employment — are just the opposite, creating greater possibilities for management's control of work time. Other workers, whose occupations already involve creativity, use new technologies as additional tools to do existing work.
The appearance of a new category in the Australian Bureau of Statistics' figures,"Business and information professionals", to replace the old category of "Business Professionals" is instructive. In the five years to last August, the total number in this category increased by nearly 200,000.
Most of this increase might be attributed to the new element in the category (although the numbers in the old category were already increasing). Allowing for some knowledge workers already being categorised as business professionals, or under other categories, an estimate of 200,000 knowledge workers — less than 3% of the work force — would seem appropriate, and the numbers do appear to be growing quickly.
But other statistics deny the trends Latham proclaims. For example, the proportion of self-employment to total employment, at 14.7%, did not change between 1978 and 1996 and self-employment is still largely confined to agriculture, construction and retail trade. Most of the millions of "wired workers" Latham says exist are missing.
Nonetheless, knowledge workers do exist. The capitalist corporate owners, generally the most class conscious part of society, are trying to grasp the significance of this for their profit drive and social control. The significance of Latham's comments is in his obscuring of the circumstances of knowledge workers.
Historical realities escape Latham's grasp: feudalism produced serfs, not farm labour, which already existed in ancient Athens and Rome, and while the industrial revolution did create factory work on a mass scale, it was capitalism that created the working class, starting with the enclosure of common lands which forced peasants into wage labour.
While Latham correctly recognises that these workers bring "nothing to the production process but their own labour", he wrongly suggests that knowledge workers draw "surplus value from their intellectual capital". All workers possess the knowledge required for their work and this is part of their labour. Capital buys the worker's ability to labour, both manually and intellectually. If workers get back some of their surplus value as wages, that money is only turned into capital if the worker becomes an employer.
What Latham fails to consider is the social relationship between knowledge workers and the owners of the equipment and workplaces they use. Knowledge workers' small, self-directed teams are precisely what allow their maximum exploitation — the workers produce more and the employers own what is produced.
The "freedom" of the knowledge worker is the possibility of social mobility — from waged worker to self-employed or employer — and a relative autonomy at work. But this should not be exaggerated. According to a survey reported in the March 9 Sydney Morning Herald, programmers, network administrators and help-desk staff are paid just above average weekly earnings and many other information technology workers only reach double this.
Moreover, Taylorism (managerial attempts to monopolise knowledge in the labour process) which Latham rails against as not adapted to the needs of an "information economy", was itself an attempt, at the turn of the century, to gain control over those workers (mainly skilled manufacturing and clerical workers) with autonomy and discretion.
Throughout the history of capitalism, workers in technologically advanced sectors of the economy have sought to use the relative shortage of their skills to improve their pay and conditions, including control over the labour process. Capitalists seek to wind that back in order to raise profits.
After the second world war, educational and scientific workers became proletarianised. Today, and tomorrow, the mass of knowledge workers face the same fate.